We encountered some issues with Files which prevented it from being released. We expect it to be coming soon.

Starting next week, if you are a Targeted Release customer who wants to try the early version of the new Outlook on the web, simply click on the “Try the new Outlook” toggle on the top right corner of your inbox. When you click the toggle, you’ll see all new Outlook on the web modules for Mail, Calendar, and People. Opt-in and out as often as you want.

Find the toggle on the top right of your inbox

Let’s look at some of the new features you can try when you opt in to the early version of Outlook on the web.

Search – No time to search? Outlook anticipates what you’ll need based on recent conversations and people with whom you work the most.

Updated search for Mail, Calendar, and People

Files (Files is coming soon) – Trying to find a file in your inbox can be a time-consuming exercise, to help you with that we have added a Files module that will show you all the files that you received or sent in your inbox.

Pro tip: Use Favorites to make sure you always find files from important people. Coming soon.

Use Files to find all the files and docs in your inbox

Suggested replies – The new Outlook brings intelligent technology to your inbox to save you time. Focus on what matters more and let Outlook help with you the rest. Use suggested replies when you need to respond with a short message, just a couple of clicks and off you go.

Select a response, edit it if you need to, and send!

Simplified event creation — You can now quickly add events to your calendar with updated event icons, so you can quickly identify events and see location suggestions to get address details.

Updated event icons let you quickly identify events

Smart room suggestions – Intelligent technology in Outlook now helps you find the best room for your meetings based on the attendees, time, availability, and your preferences.

Outlook will recommend rooms for you

Simplified add-in experience— We’ve simplified the way you access add-ins while giving you more control. Outlook add-ins bring your favorite apps right to your inbox, so you can accomplish tasks faster—including saving an email directly to your notebook, translating emails on the fly, or paying your friends. You can access popular apps and and services like Boomerang, Evernote, GIPHY, Gfycat, Microsoft Translator, MojiLaLa, PayPal, Trello, and more right from your inbox.

If you were using add-ins in the classic Outlook on the web experience, they will show up pinned next to mail actions or in the drop-down menu once you open an email in the new experience. You can also install more add-ins from the Office Store—simply open an email, click the drop-down menu, and select Get Add-ins. Once installed, add-ins will show up in the drop-down menu. You can also choose to pin frequently used add-ins.

More ways to use and manage groups in Outlook – Group-based collaboration, powered by the Office 365 Groups service, is an integral part of working in Outlook. We received a lot of valuable feedback on groups in the past and based on that we are excited to announce we have improved existing features such as faster and simpler group creation, richer group card, more efficient group email triage, and we are also introducing new features such as group Files view that focuses on the latest file activity and group management in the People module.

See a list of all your groups, take membership actions, or favorite a group – all in one place

Favorites makes things front and center – Many things at work are important and then there are the ones you can’t miss like an email from your manager or a project’s requests and updates. Favorites is perfect for those times, just add specific folders, people, or categories to your Favorites to keep them only a click away.

Add the things you can’t miss to Favorites

More ways to keep up with your groups - Groups cards can now be used from anywhere inside Outlook to view membership information, and group owners can take membership actions as well, or navigate to group apps or group resources such as Files, Planner, and SharePoint site.

Stay tuned to additional enhancements that will come over the next few months, including new and updated features. Based on your feedback, we’ll iterate, improve, refine, or discard them. To stay up-to-date, follow us on Twitter or keep an eye on the Office roadmap to see what is coming. But wait, there is more! We're also rolling out updates in Outlook for Windows.

Thank you!

Gabriel.

FAQ

Q. Who will see the toggle?

A. Organizations in Targeted Release who have not blocked the toggle

Q. Can I block the toggle?

A. Yes, if you are an Office 365 administrator you should have received a Message Center post with instructions

Q. How long will the opt-in toggle stay in Targeted Release?

A. We are driven by quality rather than a timeline, so we will release the opt-in toggle broadly when it’s ready

Q. Will I find all the classic experience features in the early version of the new Outlook on the web?

A. No. Since this is an early version of the new Outlook on the web, there will be some features not yet available on 9/10. You can read this article to learn more.

Q. What if you are missing a feature I really need?

A. You can always switch back to the classic Outlook on the web as many times as you need. You should also let us know in our UserVoice channel.

Any chance the email filters in OWA will get improved to be more useful? Currently, without the ability to do say "If subject contains the text 'blah' and 'blah2'" really makes filter a pain when you get loads of emails from various other products.

Hello @Gabriel Valdez Malpartida will it be possible to save attachments to a desired storage such as a o365 group directly from the email? Would love that you add possibility to choose place to store such as when I can choose where to attach from.. sites and groups or onedrive plus desired folder.

to me the capability to show another mailbox permanently in the overview is still missing, instead to open it in an additional tab. This would be especially practical to show my personal one and the company’s main e-mail in my case.

This all looks lovely. However, personally, I'd really like to see some improvements to Mac Desktop Outlook application, at very least make all the features that are available on the Windows version available to Mac. In this modern age, it's really quite unbelievable how different the two applications are.

I would love to have an option to print a "yearly view" of the agenda. Specially CxO's and other professionals have "whole days" booked (due to Factory visits, training sesions, etc. And they have to plan 6 to 12 months ahead. Therefore it'd be great to have a summarized view of the 6 to 12 months ahead, showing at least the name for the "whole day" agenda items, and the scattered agenda ítems just by making the day number "bold"....

For my team, one of the main reasons they stick with the desktop version over the web version is the excessive whitespace and lack of definition between panes in the web version. Using the same resolution monitor, same outlook settings (reading panel on bottom and 50/50 split) the web version displays less than half the number of messages and less detail about them in the upper pane than the desktop version does. Understood this is a web page and considerations must be made for different browsers, devices etc. but some additional display options would go a long way toward adoption in my environment. Thank you!

Will this version allow us to send emails to all of our members without being flagged for spamming each time? Outlook has for all intents & purposes become completely useless, as we have nearly 400 members we need to send e-blasts and announcements. We have not been able to do so in Outlook since we switched to 365 (and you evidently decided we were spammers.) Thank goodness for Mail Chimp/Gmail.

Interesting that with all the changes and updates to Office 365 and Outlook 365, there are still no user interface customizations to improve reading comfort with bolder fonts, better font contrast, and dark reading backgrounds. There are browser add-ins to overcome some of these problems, but those are difficult to deploy and maintain for large user groups. We want to be able to reach parity with Gmail's web interface and its theme customizations.

1. I still preferred the "Inbox and Clutter" folders to the present "Focused and Other".

1a: Any way to stop the PING for mail received in Other? Drives me crazy. The sender has been classified by me as "other" because I've told it that it's unimportant stuff. But the ping distracts me to go look for a just-received email. That's a good reason why the "Clutter" box was better than "Other".

2. The criteria for automatically sending an email to Deleted needs to be improved, i.e. the Learn feature needs to be improved. As example, a guy I work with will always send me a "thankyou" email as immediate response. I get half a dozen a day, sometimes. So to slim down my Inbox size, I push it to Deleted. However, his next email (important) went straight to Deleted based on this AI. I find I have to go through the Deleted file several times a day to check that important emails were not directed there. i.e. please improve the "learn" feature.

We would like to see our Outlook 365 environment become as customizable, comfortable, and powerful as Gmail that we have been using since it was released. So far, we don't see the Outlook 365 group headed in that direction at all. Blinding all-white screen backgrounds, impossible to read thin pastel fonts as compared to rich full-featured customization themes we already have in Gmail. That is why for us, Outlook 365 is only used for backup.

Blinding white Outlook 365 on the left, comfortable Gmail on the right.

Will you finally have a unified inbox like all other mail providers where all MS, pop3/imap emails have a simple unified inbox feature without having to manually set up a folder and divert emails or having to add all email as permission on the main account.....so frustrating and something that is going to send us to Google if not fixed by renewal

If we opt out of the Beta phase, will we be notified if and when the new look will become the mandatory default look? Also, is the disabling of the Toggle an all or nothing setting, or can we disable it for end-user and have it enabled for IT staff?

Will the new version of Outlook on the web use permanent URLs for individual messages? The ability to save a permalink to a particular message is invaluable if you're using any kind of external task manager. This is one feature I sorely miss from Gmail.

In the Admin Center under Settings navigate to Organization profile. On that page you see Release preferences. Click edit and choose the prefered option, Targeted release for everyone or Targeted release for selected users.

My own account is listed as targeted in organisational profile and I haven't done anything with the opt-out toggle but I can't see the slider in Outlook. What am I doing wrong? It's two days since this feature was going to be launched - or is it a rolling update and one's tenant is not updated yet? How do I check if my tenant has the new feature? So many questions... :)

UPDATE: I found the link to access shared mailboxes! It is exactly where it has been, but you have to go to the calendar tab to see it.

Any idea when access to a shared mailbox will come back to the Outlook Web App? Seems to be missing in the new look. Love the new look with the dark theme, but have to switch back to the old version to get the link to access a shared mailbox.

It's now the 20th September - still no sign of any toggle. I checked with MS support and they confirm that we are set for targeted release but that we haven't received it.

Perhaps you could correct your article as it says "Starting next week, if you are a Targeted Release customer who wants to try the early version of the new Outlook on the web, simply click on the “Try the new Outlook” toggle on the top right corner of your inbox"

MS support say that they have no information as to when some tenants will get this. Rather annoying to keep reading about it all over the place

Accessing a shared folder is not the same as accessing another mailbox. For now, you'll have to toggle back to the 'old' version of OWA and when you're done with the other mailbox, toggle the new version back on.

The new "Decline meeting request" functionality has taken a step back in terms of usability in terms of clicks (3 as opposed to 2) plus a lot more mouse movement to move a slider. Before, you simply clicked "Decline" and selected "Don't send the response":

Now you have to click no, move the mouse over to the right, toggle off "Notify organiser" and hit send:

The context menu was much quicker. I get a lot of meeting requests that I have to decline this way. Considering the title is "The Outlook on the web user experience gets simpler and more powerful" the answer on this one is "Nope" and "Nope".

This one is just annoying but not been able to open other mailboxes is a showstopper.

Has the new Outlook web interface cocked up the rendering of one's avatar in Office 365. Or is this just coincidence. When I load the company SharePoint home page, my avatar appears briefly:

But after a second, it disappears and displays my initials:

It never appears in the new Outlook web - always just "HC".

Hmm, could be a fault elsewhere as on the SharePoint home page where it appears and then disappears, there is a new green tick on there and on clicking my icon, it doesn't show my avatar.

I know 100% that I have not changed my avatar for years (as it's the company logo) but I've only spotted it's disappearing since trying the new Outlook web app...

Later... this problem only occurs in Edge. It's fine in Chrome. Except you don't get the option to try the new Outlook in Chrome. I assume that is by design, i.e. the button is only displayed when you're running Edge??

@Gabriel Valdez Malpartida does this option require the "targeted to organization" or can we expect it to come soon for the handful of people we have with "targeted release" turned on specifically for? We have several anxiously awaiting this feature from our Senior Leadership team (tagged as targeted release) but nothing yet.